Friday, May 10, 2013

The Council Has Spoken!! This Week's Watcher's Council Results

The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and we have the results for this week's Watcher's Council match up!

But before we get to that,I and my fellow Council members want to wish the mothers amongst you an absolutely wonderful Mother's Day.

Is there any bond like that of a child and their mother? If you're fortunate enough to still have yours around, ignore the hype, the obligatory greeting card frenzy.Take her out for a leisurely lunch, talk to her, write her a long letter or take time out for a phone call if you're not living in the same city, but most of all just spend time with her and let her know how important she is to you.

And if she's made the passage, spend some time remembering how special she was and let the friendly ghost of memory envelop you.

OK to business.

Ah, extremism...mostly that depends on which end of the telescope you're looking into, as Jonathan Swift would remind us if he were around today.

This week's winner, Bookworm Room's"Extremism" when it comes to late term abortion and guns is a fascinating comparison of the Left and the Right's feelingss about abortion versus their views on gun confiscation...and why one is an entirely different issue than the other. Here's a slice:

Kirsten Powers, one of Fox News’ resident Democrats, is the person who forced the Kermit Gosnell mass murder onto the front page. Before Powers shamed the media into pretending, if only for a few days, that the trial of one the most prolific serial killers in American history actually mattered, the media had managed to ignore almost entirely Kermit Gosnell’s trial. With Powers’ “J’Accuse” moment on USA Today, however, the media was forced to acknowledge the trial, if only momentarily, and to engage in a cursory analysis of its motives. The analysis was pathetic, but they did it. (E.g., “We’ve decided that we didn’t ignore the trial because it was about an abortionist; we ignored it because our incredibly savvy business sense, which has seen most liberal print media outlets totter to the edge of the grave, told us that there was no money in this one.”)

Powers has written another indictment of the Left’s fanatic support for abortion. This time, her focus is on the pathological denial that sees the Left pretend that a fully matured fetus is just a clump of cells:

What we need to learn from the Gosnell case is that late-term abortion is infanticide. Legal infanticide. That so many people in the media seem untroubled by the idea that 12 inches in one direction is a “private medical decision” and 12 inches in the other direction causes people to react in horror, should be troubling. Indeed, Gosnell’s defense attorney Jack J. McMahon has relied on the argument that Gosnell killed the babies prior to delivering them, therefore he is not guilty of murder. His exact words were: “Every one of those babies died in utero.”[snip]We live in a country where if a six-months-pregnant woman started downing shots of vodka in a bar or lit up a cigarette, people might want her arrested. But that same woman could walk into an abortion clinic, no questions asked, and be injected with a drug that would stop her baby’s heart.

I’ll put my cards on the table: I think life begins at conception and would love to live in a world where no women ever felt she needed to get an abortion. However, I know enough people who are pro-abortion rights—indeed, I was one of them for most of my life—to know that reasonable and sincere people can disagree about when meaningful life begins. They also can disagree about how to weigh that moral uncertainty against a woman’s right to control her body—and her own life. I have only ever voted for Democrats, so overturning Roe v. Wade is not one of my priorities. I never want to return to the days of gruesome back-alley abortions.

But medical advances since Roe v. Wade have made it clear to me that late-term abortion is not a moral gray area, and we need to stop pretending it is. No six-months-pregnant woman is picking out names for her “fetus.” It’s a baby. Let’s stop playing Orwellian word games. We are talking about human beings here.

Powers is absolutely right. I’m pleased and proud to say that, even in my most fiercely pro-Choice days, I wouldn’t have countenanced the abortion of a viable infant. Nevertheless, I do have to part ways with the core premise in Powers’ article, which is that NARAL and the NRA are both equally extreme, and therefore both equally open to being castigated and disregarded

Speaking as a liberal who endorses more government regulation of practically everything—banks, water, air, food, oil drilling, animal safety—I am eternally perplexed by the fury the abortion rights contingent displays at the suggestion that the government might have a serious role to play in the issue of abortion, especially later-term abortion. More and more, the abortion rights community has become the NRA of the left: unleashing their armies of supporters and lobbyists in opposition to regulations or restrictions that the majority of Americans support. In the same way the NRA believes background checks will lead to the government busting down your door to confiscate your guns, the abortion rights movement conjures a straight line from parental consent to a complete ban on abortion.

Powers is wrong to claim that the two institutions are alike and that both are equally extreme. They’re not the same and for one very specific reason: the Constitution.

NARAL is predicated upon a Supreme Court case that found an emanation of a penumbra of an assumed, but never explicitly named, constitutional right to privacy and, from that, created an unfettered right to abort a fetus during its first trimester. Somehow that limited right morphed into an equally unfettered right to abort a fetus, not just in the first trimester, but right up to, including, and after its birth. Even the authors of Roe v. Wade would concede that those on the Left who defend late term or post-birth abortions have hit a high note on the extremist scale. Extremism in defense of an illusory right premised on a magical interpretation of a clearly written historic contract between the people and their federal government is . . . well, extremely extreme.

But about the NRA. . . . Where does it get the idea that the government should absolutely and completely stay away from law-abiding citizens’ guns? Are those gun rights nuts also relying on an emanation of a penumbra of an unstated right? In a word, no. Instead, the NRA is ensuring that the government does not overreach its explicitly described limitation of power under the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

In our non-Council category, the winner was Barry Snell writing in the Iowa State Daily with Waking the dragon — How Feinstein fiddled while America burned submitted by Bookworm Room. It's a superb rant on some fully justifiable reasons why pro Second Amendment Americans have no reason to trust anti-gun Americans, and what the ultimate consequences of that could be. By the way, did you know that in addition to her phalanx of heavily armed 24 hour security, gun confiscation nut Senator Feinstein of California owns a .38 revolver and has a concealed carry permit, something that's almost impossible to get in California unless you're a celebrity or a wealthy businessperson who donates to the right campaigns or a politician? I didn't. Even though she has professional protection provided by the taxpayers, she still wants to be able to defend herself - but the rest of you peasants can just wait until the police arrive and hope you're still breathing and unharmed by the time they get there. Do read it.

OK, here are this week’s full results, Only Simply Jews was unable to vote this week, but was not subject to the usual 2/3 vote penalty.

See you next week! Don't forget to tune in on Monday AM for this week's Watcher's Forum, as the Council and their invited special guests take apart one of the provocative issues of the day with short takes and weigh in...don't you dare miss it. And don't forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.....'cause we're cool like that!